... WikiSym is changing is for the same reason. People are not going to the conference! I think the attendance has been below 100 for some time now. That's not a sustainable number for the amount of work that goes into organizing a conference.
I would like to see an honest comparison of, for example, the reported benefits of in-person conferences compared to their social and economic costs. Meeting people in person is valuable, but I think it happens more often than it needs to in most fields. Until people get serious about organizing workflow around teleconferencing, huge and expensive inefficiencies will persist. People love deductible junkets, but where is the cost-benefit analysis?
F2F builds trust in a way that seems harder to achieve by electronic means. I find if distributed teams initially meet in person (including eating and drinking together), subsequent electronic communication will work a lot better than if there wasn't initial F2F. I am not sure I can explain it but it's definitely been my observation.
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On 05/11/2012, at 9:36 AM, "James Salsman" jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
... WikiSym is changing is for the same reason. People are not going to the conference! I think the attendance has been below 100 for some time now. That's not a sustainable number for the amount of work that goes into organizing a conference.
I would like to see an honest comparison of, for example, the reported benefits of in-person conferences compared to their social and economic costs. Meeting people in person is valuable, but I think it happens more often than it needs to in most fields. Until people get serious about organizing workflow around teleconferencing, huge and expensive inefficiencies will persist. People love deductible junkets, but where is the cost-benefit analysis?
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On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:10 AM, Kerry Raymond k.raymond@qut.edu.au wrote:
F2F builds trust in a way that seems harder to achieve by electronic means. I find if distributed teams initially meet in person (including eating and drinking together), subsequent electronic communication will work a lot better than if there wasn't initial F2F. I am not sure I can explain it but it's definitely been my observation.
+1
I'm sure everyone can talk about conference "success stories" as well as tales of terrible time-wasters.
One success story for me: I met someone who turned out to be a future collaborator at Wikimania in Gdansk. My experiences at the co-located WikiSym did not seem to have the same staying power. The thing is, it would be rather hard to know this in advance. My "academic" contribution to WikiSym is what opened the door to me traveling there in the first place. Also, the only reason he and I ended up collaborating was because we later met online, again by chance, and already knew about one another's work and motivations.
The moral, I think, is to look for principles that increase the chances of serendipity. Things like OpenSpace try to do that, but I think are less powerful than "the real thing".
It seems to me that the same sort of thoughts (and criteria) should apply to building (and assessing) research / discourse communities online. YES there are many times when I've met collaborators first online. But I nearly always go to visit the strongest collaborators in person at some point!
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